Boeing 747 vs 737: How Much Bigger the Jumbo Really Is, and Why Boeing Stopped Building It

Is a 747 bigger than a 737? By a lot

This is the question almost everyone arrives with, so here is the plain answer. The Boeing 747-8 is 250 feet 2 inches long (76.25 m). The Boeing 737-800 is 129 feet 6 inches long (39.47 m).

The jumbo is very nearly twice as long. Its wingspan tells the same story: 224 feet 5 inches (68.4 m) against 117 feet 5 inches (35.79 m) for a winglet-equipped 737-800.

Weight is where the gap stops being describable. The 747-8 has a maximum takeoff weight of 987,000 pounds (447,700 kg). The 737-800 tops out at 174,200 pounds (79,016 kg).

That is a ratio of about five and a half to one. A fully loaded 737-800 weighs less than a third of what the jumbo’s wing alone has to lift into the air.

One more size note worth having. The 747-8 is the longest airliner in passenger service anywhere in the world, beating the Airbus A340-600 by about three feet.

It will lose that title to the Boeing 777-9, which measures 251 feet 9 inches. As of September 2026 the 777-9 has not been certified, and Boeing is targeting a first delivery in 2027.

They were never competing for the same job

Comparing these two as rivals is the mistake most “737 vs 747” discussions make. Boeing did not build them to fight each other, and no airline has ever chosen between them.

The 747-8 has a range of 7,730 nautical miles, or about 8,895 miles (14,320 km). That is Frankfurt to Buenos Aires without stopping.

The 737-800 is published at 2,935 nautical miles, roughly 3,377 miles (5,436 km). That covers New York to Los Angeles with fuel in hand, and it cannot cross the Pacific.

So the jumbo flies about two and a half times farther. The more useful difference is how each one earns money: the 747-8 does one long flight a day, while a 737-800 might do four or five short ones.

The cabin: two aisles and an upper deck against one aisle

Inside is where the size difference becomes something you can feel rather than read. The 747-8’s main cabin is 20 feet wide (6.1 m) and seats up to 10 people abreast in economy, split by two aisles.

The 737-800 cabin is 11 feet 7 inches wide (3.54 m), with a single aisle and three seats on each side of it. There is no configuration in which it is anything else.

Then there is the second deck, which no narrowbody has ever had. The 747-8 carries the longest upper deck of any 747, and airlines have used it for business class, a lounge, or a private cabin.

That hump exists for an odd reason: Boeing put the cockpit upstairs so the nose could hinge open for cargo, because it expected supersonic jets to make the 747 obsolete as a passenger aircraft. We covered why the 747’s cockpit ended up on the second floor separately.

On seat counts, the 747-8 is typically quoted at 467 passengers in three classes. The 737-800 carries 162 in two classes and 189 at maximum density.

Four engines against two, and why that decided everything

The 747-8 has four General Electric GEnx-2B67 engines, each rated around 66,500 pounds of thrust. Total installed thrust is roughly 266,000 pounds.

The 737-800 has two CFM56-7B engines in the 27,300-pound class, for about 54,600 pounds. A single jumbo engine produces more thrust than both 737 engines put together.

Four engines is the whole commercial story of the 747-8. Every engine is a separate maintenance program, a separate overhaul bill, and a separate set of spare parts to keep in stock.

Fuel follows the same curve. The 747-8 holds 63,034 US gallons (238,610 L) against 6,875 gallons (26,020 L) for the 737-800, and our piece on how much fuel a 747 actually holds puts that number in context.

None of that is a problem if you fill 467 seats. It is a serious problem if you fill 300, which is why twin-engine widebodies took the long-haul market away from the jumbo.

The 787 against the 747 is the comparison that actually ended the 747’s passenger career, and it is a much closer fight than this one.

Speed: the jumbo is genuinely the faster aircraft

People expect the smaller, newer-feeling jet to be quicker. It is not.

The 747-8 cruises at Mach 0.855, which Boeing credits to its new wing, the raked wingtips and the GEnx engines. The 737-800 cruises at about Mach 0.79.

In practice that is roughly 50 knots of difference at cruising altitude. Over a transatlantic sector it is worth most of half an hour, which is why the 747 kept a reputation for being fast right to the end.

What air traffic control sees: Heavy against Medium

Here is a difference that never shows up in spec tables but shapes every flight both aircraft make. Controllers do not treat them as the same kind of object.

ICAO puts any aircraft with a maximum takeoff weight of 136,000 kg (300,000 lb) or more in the Heavy wake turbulence category. The 747-8 clears that bar three times over.

The 737-800 sits in the Medium band. A jumbo trails wingtip vortices powerful enough to roll a smaller aircraft, so anything following it has to be given extra spacing.

Airports feel the size difference too. The 747-8’s wingspan pushed it from ICAO Code E, where the 747-400 sat, into Code F, and Boeing’s own airport compatibility guidance notes that most of the world’s major airports were built to Code E standards.

The 737-800 is a Code C aircraft, the same bracket as an Airbus A320. It can use gates and taxiways at thousands of airports that could never take a 747 at all.

Why the 737-800 won, in one number

Boeing delivered 4,989 commercial 737-800s, plus 224 military airframes and 23 corporate BBJ2s. It is the best-selling variant Boeing has ever built.

Boeing built 155 747-8s in total. Only 48 of those were passenger aircraft, and exactly three airlines ordered them: Lufthansa took 19, Korean Air 10 and Air China 7.

Read those two paragraphs together and the verdict writes itself. The market that needed 400-plus seats on one airframe turned out to be tiny, and the market for 162 seats flown five times a day turned out to be enormous.

The 747-8’s real customer was cargo. Of the 155 built, 107 were freighters, and the 747-8 Freighter still has no direct replacement for outsized loads through its hinging nose.

Where each one stands in 2026

Both aircraft are out of production, which surprises people about the 737-800 in particular.

Boeing ended civil 737NG production in January 2020, with the last deliveries going to China Eastern. The airframe lives on as the P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft and as 737-800BCF freighter conversions.

The 747 line closed on 31 January 2023, when Boeing handed the 1,574th and final 747, a 747-8 Freighter, to Atlas Air. That ended 54 years of jumbo production.

Lufthansa, Korean Air and Air China still fly passengers on the 747-8. Lufthansa is fitting its jumbos with new Allegris cabins and expects to keep them into the 2030s, while Korean Air has shrunk its fleet and points at retirement around 2030.

The 737-800 is in a slower, much larger decline. Thousands remain in service with carriers including Ryanair, Southwest and American, and they are being replaced by the 737 MAX 8 as they age out.

That Air Force One connection is the 747-8’s most visible remaining role. We tracked the interim aircraft in our report on the Qatar-gifted 747-8 now flying the president.

So which one is better?

As an aircraft, the 747-8. It is bigger, faster, flies far farther, carries nearly three times the passengers, and it is one of the most capable airliners ever certified.

As a business, the 737-800, and it is not close. Boeing sold roughly 100 of them for every passenger 747-8 it managed to place.

As a passenger, the 747-8 is the better ride if you have the choice. Two aisles, an upper deck, a quieter cabin and a smoother feel in turbulence all come free with the weight.

You will almost certainly not have the choice, though, and that is the honest end of the comparison. A handful of routes still offer a 747-8, while the 737-800 is one of the most common airliners in the sky.

If you want the jumbo measured against something in its own class, try the 747-8 against the Airbus A380, or see where it lands in our ranking of the biggest aircraft in the world.